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Show HN: Visual flow-based programming for Erlang, inspired by Node-RED

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202 points Towaway69 | 1 comments | 16 May 25 14:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.263s | source

Hi There,

Erlang-RED has been my project for the last couple of months and I would love to get some feedback from the HN community.

The idea is to take advantage of Erlangs message passing and low overhead processes to have true concurrency in Node-RED flows. Plus also to bring low-code visual flow-based programming to Erlang.

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mystraline ◴[16 May 25 16:55 UTC] No.44007580[source]▶
I was an early adopter of NodeRed. Earlier, it worked exceptionally well.

Now? Not so much.

Well, that's not exactly true. Base NodeRed works as well as before. But the libraries of modules to interface with all sorts of websites, APIs, hardware, and other stuff is rotten to the core.

Most plugins/js modules either just don't work, or 'successfully fail'. The easier fail case is where the module can't be installed due to ancient (6mo or older JS, sigh) modules.

I abandoned NR because its basically a hyper-speed bitrot due to terrible library module versioning. And I didn't want to reinvent the wheel on every system I wanted to touch.

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1. Towaway69 ◴[16 May 25 17:12 UTC] No.44007764[source]▶
I wrote an article about this[1] and you are definitely right: a lot of packages are rotting away a bit however, because NodeRED does a lot to stay backward compatible, older packages still work. The oldest ones I'm actively using are five or more years old, i.e., haven't been touched nor updated - still work.

What I tried to say in the article is the same as you say: base NodeRED, the core works really well and has great features - no questions. And even if packages die, the core will still remain usable and that makes a difference.

Its a bit like saying Linux is a pile of broken bits because the ls command has been updated in ten years: Linux will always work and those commands that are based on the core will continue to work becausae the Linux kernel will largely remain backward compatible. Packages fail when they have external dependencies that change but code that is solely based on the core will continue to work.

[1] https://blog.openmindmap.org/blog/crunchy-numbers